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Criticism
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 (American Book Review November/December 2003 Volume 25, Number 1)
Searching for Nowhere
Embedded in utopian thinking are so many ironies that one might conclude, after enumerating them, that the idea of a paradise was devised to house its impossibilities, not to resolve them. A utopia is, as commonly thought, neither something perfect in its momentariness (the seventh game of the World Series, tied in the ninth inning) nor something supposedly once perfect (life in small-town America). While eu-topos refers to "good place," ou-topos, or utopia, refers to "no place." How can a place be no place? It’s in the nature of the mind to form paradoxes, make literary constructs, smoke the artistic hookah. Our wiring tells us to imagine that which we can’t have. For two reasons: to change or accept our lot. In the latter case, utopian thinking is a Bodhisattva-like calling, helping us to accept what is, not what isn’t. What is, is unalterable, and, perhaps, is what should be.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader October 17, 2003)
1.
It’s an August mid-afternoon in El Cajon. It’s 100 degrees, and the sane people are in the shade, keeping still. Not Mike Davis. For an hour, the most famous social historian of southern California has been walking me through Bostonia, a two-square mile enclave just north of El Cajon, where he grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. With hat and sunglasses, I’m burning up; head and eyes uncovered, Davis beads a lone ball of sweat. Having lived in Los Angeles, London, New York, and Hawaii, he has once again settled in San Diego. Though he’s fidgety about being back, he seems at home in East County, especially since he’s been writing about the place that made him. The author of City of Quartz and other books about L.A.’s past and future woes has, with two local authors, just written a new book, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See. It’s a history of local sleaze, in "the most corrupt city on the West Coast," beginning with His Highness of Corruption, Alonzo Horton, and ending with Her Majesty of Folly, Susan Golding.
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Criticism
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 (San Diego Union-Tribune October 5, 2003)
The Fatalist
In Pete Dexter's multiracial Los Angeles, the time is 1953, and the city is quickly being encircled with housing developments and leisure venues to serve the new tracts. Inexorable sunshine and aquaducted water have birthed a spate of golf courses, opportunity mills for game and graft. Small-time syndicates are everywhere—boxing rings, extortion schemes and colluding white cops who will stage a murder if a black man's "inherent criminality" can be fingered.
The wayward center of Dexter's sixth novel (Paris Trout won the National Book Award in 1988) is an 18-year-old black man—real name Lionel, nickname Train. Train's turf is Brookline, a Brentwood country club, where he caddies and occasionally works on the greens. He stays at his mom's place under the vengeful eye of her boyfriend, keeps every feeling to himself and plays a torrid round of golf. But since he's black, he can only practice his stroke in the half-light of early morning or late evening, when the course is closed.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader September 4, 2003)
On Saturday, September 6, 1958, Marilyn Monroe and the 175-person company of Some Like It Hot arrived at the Hotel del Coronado to begin location shots, after filming in Hollywood the previous four weeks. The movie, cowritten and directed by Billy Wilder, is about two musicians, played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who, to elude a gang of bootleggers, dress up in drag and join an all-girl band. Tony Curtis falls in love with the band’s lead singer, Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, played by Monroe. Wilder set the movie in 1929 Chicago, which was recreated at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, and at a resort hotel in Miami, Florida, for which the Hotel Del was the stand-in. The San Diego Union’s drama editor, Edwin Martin, noted in a puff piece that Monroe was “still beautiful and still shy.” He said her playwright-husband Arthur Miller was expected, along with Paula Strasberg, her “dramatic mentor, wife of the famous head of the New York Actor’s Studio,” where Monroe, who had not done a Hollywood picture in two years, had been studying.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader August 21, 2003)
It may be the ultimate irony of the conflict with Iraq that to glimpse the difficult home lives of our soldiers, their spouses, and their children, America needs a foreign war. And, even as those lives arise from obscurity, we have heard about of the front-line fighters much more than the base-bound families, especially the youngest, many of whom are poor and do, on occasion, go hungry. Proof of their need is how high the compassion index shot up this spring in San Diego. A half-dozen outreach groups and food drives were organized, among them Operation Homefront and Navy Wives Food Locker, to assist families. Some groups, however, are always on watch. One such is Military Outreach Ministries, sponsored by the county’s 33 Presbyterian churches and the Presbytery of San Diego. Begun in the early 1960s as Military Parish Visitors, the original band of volunteer women visited military bases, in times of war and peace, to ask wives about their needs. Today, the Ministries—its name now forms the acronym MOM.—runs bi-weekly food supplements and weekly bread drives to women and their children, who are surviving on an enlisted man’s salary.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader August 7, 2003)
Bienvenidos
In April 2001, 15-year-old Reina was leaving her home in Tenancingo, a high-plateau town west of Mexico City. She was happier than she’d been in a while, traveling north to Tijuana, in the company of Arturo López-Rojas. At 32, Arturo was nicely dressed, heavy, and short, barely five feet tall; Reina, with a pretty round face, was shorter by several inches. Arturo was taking her to the border crossing at San Diego to get her into the United States; he would then deliver her to her new job as a housekeeper, maybe with children to watch; he also vowed that once she had established herself, they would marry. This bundle of offerings excited Reina. She knew of other girls who’d made the trip to California, who were cleaning grand houses with grassy yards and swimming pools and sending money to their loved ones in Tenancingo—dollars instead of pesos.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader June 26, 2003)
"You won how much?" I asked again.
"Ten million," he repeated, as though it were the time of day. Then, just as flatly, he asked that his name not be used, though he would "throw" a few facts my way, careful to conceal his identity behind cryptic remarks. In 2001 the former San Diegan had won $10 million on the SuperLotto Plus (matching six of six numbers), after buying an "Instant Millionaire" winning ticket in 1994. "I’m really blessed," he said, "basically because I’m a really good person. To somebody who never had money, the first time I won was a nightmare. You get under a lot of stress when you make investments. I like to gamble—I’ve been gambling since I was 21—[so I] walk into these Indian casinos and right away, just because of my past, they think I’m doing something. My past is my past; it’s over with. Now I live a simple, humble life. I’m married and I have a beautiful dog. That’s the way life is. I still work for a corporation in San Diego," though now he’s moved to a high desert community, where he continues to bet on the Lotto.
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